That guy's a Maniac...

Last year, Nintendo made the slightly uncontroversial and in line with what competitors have been doing for decades business decision to start charging for the service to play games online with the Nintendo Switch. In order to sweeten the deal somewhat a paid membership gets you access to online play, exclusive offers (such as cosmetics in some games and those stupid but cool but stupid but expensive but worth it NES Switch controllers), sometimes cloud saves and most controversially gives you access to a growing library of NES games playable as long as you're subbed up. Some vocal gamers, however, did not like this decision at all because they either already own and play the NES games on offer (lies nobody ever intentionally bought Super Dodge Ball let alone played it on the go) or they didn't want the NES games but wouldn't mind free N64 games or SNES games perhaps? Like winged monkeys with neckbeards they took to social media en mass to whine about it. This level of

Dear Snowflakes, What is your fucking problem, pie and mash not good enough for you, why don’t you go and have a word with yourself before I anti-vax your Pain au Chocolat! Yeah that’s right jog on before you do yourself a culturally appropriated mischief, innit. You think the fucking King of all Cosmos is watching the latest fucking lecture from Dr Who on woke culture? Nah m8, he’s putting his boys out on the front line, gettin ‘em learning the family trade and any of you muggy cunts out there sipping on gender fluid organic cruelty free soy lattes, who are not doing the same should be ordered to ring the parents of a soldier who has died serving their country in Afghanistan and tell them their reasons. Brexit means Brexit! Imperial measurements, blue passports, mothers pride bread and tesco value beans, top of the pops and rehashes of games from 2004. Fuck the 350 million to the NHS, I’ll give £16.99 of my hard earned for that privilege! Just the price of a pint of milk in

For those of us bored to tears by the prospect of VR (hey remember 3D TVs everyone? #GameChanger) and not interested in the two and a half games currently out on the Nintendo Switch at the moment, it is with some surprise that Ninty seems to be actively keeping the 3DS going for a it longer now. With the Nintendo Switch supposedly covering both mobile and living room play because, you know, people love to play video games on the go. When did you last see someone playing a handheld in public? Seriously? Think about it? I haven't had a StreetPass for 4 years now let alone seen a Vita in the wild. Nobody plays games on the go. Not in the UK anyway. It's just an advert to get mugged. Anyway, with the Switch now out, we'd assumed that the 3DS like the Wii, Wii-U and Gamecube before it, would have been instantly given a handful of ketamine and put on a life support drip with nothing but a few years of being pumped full of shovelware to con parents with before officially being

Well there you go, after a few months of Constantly looking for streetpasses, Streetpass Quest (and 2) is complete, all items obtained, i never need to rescue the King and his offspring again. I am nether elated or deflated about this. I now need to find something else to occupy my time for 3 minutes on a commute. The streetpass games are not games, they are at best glorified puzzle games with an evil addictive core to make you a completionist. I'm not sad Streetpass Quest is out my life, I'm not even that excited I completed it. Well, there you go... Love and indifference, Richie X

It's been a while since a canon entry in the ongoing saga of Omastar . Well. That's a Cyrus-like turnabout. Whatever happened to the sweet young Omastar from back in the day? Gross. Adapted from the 19th century original The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife by Hokusai.

MCV reports that Nintendo will be shutting down several Wii online services . Our heart skipped a beat for a second thinking that maybe the plug had been pulled on Monster Hunter Tri or Mario Kart Wii and our hunter might be trapped in subexcellent armour or our online ranking on MK might be forever frozen at a measly 8500 points. Fortunately, for the meantime, these games aren't affected but come the 28th of June Nintendo, News, Weather, Everybody Votes and Mii Contest Channels will be mothballed forever. Also going is the ability to send messages on the Wii Message Board This illustrates something that really pisses us off about modern consoles; increasingly the console and games you buy are really just a license to use services until such time as the servers are unplugged.  Now most people probably won't mourn the loss of these services but as this series has shown we thought they were pretty great albeit underused service. We've had some hands on time with New Su

Who wants a review of a nine year old game? Who DOESN'T want a review of a nine year old game more like? Yes Wii U is almost upon us and all those retarded journos, the morons who run GAME and those ridiculous early adopters won't stop bloody going on about it. However, much like the 3DS it feels like a series of reruns. There's genuinely nothing original on the platform bar Nintendoland but I can tell you now that 90% of Wii U games won't pick up on the brilliant idea of hiding information on the game pad or asymmetric gameplay.  It'll be like motion controls all over again. Everyone and their dog will make platformers where poor old player 5 (the mum character in the current TV spots) jabs the screen to create platforms and generally has far less fun than a quick spot of rub the man in the boat.   But fuck new games. I'm still catching up with the Gamecube releases. I distrust those pricks online who claim to be 'bored' by a console (normally

We check in with the Wii's Nintendo Channel because, well you won't bother to do it on your own. Here's some of the new content that is up since last time . Finally! It seems like someone out there has been reading our weekly-ish gripes about Nintendo's poorly used Nintendo Channel and they've only gone and posted the entirety of Satoru Iwata's Japanese Nintendo Direct presentation. This is what we want. No gimmicks. No bullshit round the bush hype just straight up Nintendo news from Nintendo itself. Sure, there's a whole bunch of "Details not confirmed for Europe" disclaimers but I'd rather that than having to wait for the video game blogosphere to give us the news once they've added their sneery commentary or worse have to sit through the NoA Nintendo Direct presentations. More of this please Ninty and if you don't have a Wii you can watch the presentation here ! The Last Story continues to receive some love from the Nintendo

It's been a couple of weeks since we tuned into the Nintendo Channel to see what's up on ninty's very own TV channel. That's deliberate because the channel has a relatively low turn over and the videos seem to be programmed by a mental who doesn't really understand how marketing works. So we've matchsticked our eyes open long enough to suffer through the latest crop of hit-and-miss offering. What's new? There's a couple of Resident Evil Revelations videos up. They are as dull as the previous ones sadly whilst at the same time giving us the feeling like we've played the game already. More nonsense Mario Kart " Player challenge " vids. Yet another 'series' on the channel that just baffles. Initially these videos introduced challenges in a range of games and we're all for lengthening the long tail of interest on titles older than two weeks. Now, however, they're just Mario Kart 7 time trial videos. If you really are des

Nintendo Channel: Poor Showing would be more apt. We log into the Wii's Nintendo channel every week and see what is on offer so you don't have to! This week's poor showing is: Something about Resident Evil Revelations . I'm sure it is great (well reviews don't say it is that great) but I'm a little bit underwhelmed by Capcom's marketing output. Ooooooh it has a chaptered structure. Great it has a cast that is beginning to rival Sonic in terms of blandness and breadth! If I wasn't a Resident Evil fan those two points aren't exactly selling the series to me yet this is the second or third Nintendo channel clip of Capcom staff talking about those two very very dull things. Another pointless Player Challenge video for Mario Kart 7. We whinged about them before .  There's a new weekly downloads trailer. I don't know about you but Balloon Kid, Double Bloob, Successfully Learning Mathematics Year 3 and The Very Hungry Caterpillar's ABCs

It's our first look at the Wii's Nintendo Channel in 2012 ( here is all the previous Now Showings). What will the hit-and-miss Nintendo channel bring this year? Our money is on- inconsistent videos, series that inexplicably end after one or two videos and in general poor use of an otherwise extremely well placed marketing tool. So what do we have? Bizarrely, Nintendo TV  the monthly show from the Official Nintendo Magazine, has been reset back to episode one again for the new year. There's now a woman presenter rather than that Welsh chap but sadly it seems the script writer hasn't changed. Expect cringey dad-joke "humour" in spades. One improvement in this awful ONM vehicle is that the episode is now divided up into different sections. Hopefully this means we won't get quite so many Mario/Zelda retrospectives/love letters. There's two tutorial videos up for Boom Street , Nintendo's odd Dragon Quest/Mushroom Kingdom/Monopoly game. The tra

This is part of an occasional series. Normally we catch up with the Nintendo Channel every fortnight and give the low down on what's happening. In August we got pretty fucked off because the only new content on the channel since August was a weekly downloads trailer that included 1950s Lawnmower Kids as its only download. I wish we were lying. YEAH THANKS BECAUSE I WASN'T SOLD ON THE CONCEPT UNTIL THIS STUPID ANNOYING VIDEO CAME ALONG. EGG ON MY FACE. I TAKE IT BACK. 1950s LAWNMOWER KIDS IS AN UNDER APPRECIATED CLASSIC. I IMAGINE. This months output has us grinding our teeth into dentine dust. It drives us nuts. Nintendo has a channel that sits on every single Wii . That's about 87 million owners right there. Okay so probably not all of them have ever used the channel but the channel has been watched for over one million hours by approximately 500,000 users. This number could be more but that's the minimum amount of players who have allowed their data to be com